


Discipline

by MidwinterMonday



Series: Songs of Innocence [4]
Category: The Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Childhood, Childhood Memories, Discipline, Family, Fathers & Sons, Gen, Jocelyn Morgenstern, Lessons, Parental Love, Parents & Children, Punishment, Upbringing, love and cruelty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-08
Updated: 2016-02-05
Packaged: 2018-05-12 00:09:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5646823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MidwinterMonday/pseuds/MidwinterMonday
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(March 1997)<br/>Discipline, the cardinal virtue of the soldier.  A different sort of story about father and son.  Lest we forget the dark side of Jace's childhood with Valentine....</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Jace

**Author's Note:**

> I've written a lot of stories about the glimmerings of love and security that shine so unsettlingly out of Jace's childhood with Valentine. Here's a story to redress the balance: an overdue reminder of the darker side of his upbringing — and a stab at understanding it.
> 
> Canon: My fics take the original City of Bones trilogy as canon. (For more about why I haven't read the later MI books, see my profile).
> 
> As always, everything in this fic belongs to the incomparable Cassandra Clare: characters, story and universe, of course, but also tone and language and imagery, which I've borrowed shamelessly to try to get closer to the feel of her story. To the extent that I've succeeded, the credit is entirely hers.

* * *

 

 _Take time to thrive, my ray of hope, in the garden of Dromore._  
_Take heed, young eaglet, till thy wings are feathered fit to soar._  
_A little rest, and then the world is full of work to do._

 _—_ _Harold Boulton, The Garden of Dromore_

* * *

**Discipline**  
by Midwinter Monday

 

Some days you could tell before lunchtime it was going to be a bad day.

He'd been bogged down all morning in a boring bit of _Le Comte de Monte-Cristo_ and got told off three times for letting his attention wander; and then his knife slipped on the bow he was whittling, taking off a big splinter of yew — and a smaller slice of his thumb — and _then_ he'd managed to lose his favourite lead Shadowhunter somewhere under the wintry tangle of the beech hedge.

And now this.

Jace hesitated a moment outside the door to his father's study trying to guess what he was in trouble for this time.  There were, he thought regretfully, an awful lot of possibilities. He had a bad feeling he'd left the front door open on his way out this morning, and he knew for a fact there were some very muddy boot prints in the hall.

There was also the spade he'd left in two pieces by the garden wall he was trying to tunnel under.

Or — with a sudden sinking of the heart — he hadn't forgotten his dagger on the bench by the carp pond yesterday, had he?  There had been some pretty dire warnings the last time he'd let good steel lie out overnight in the dew.

Promised retribution come due, he thought philosophically.

But when he pushed open the door, he knew instantly it wasn't any of these things.  His father was standing by the fireplace, one booted foot propped on the fender and an open book in his hand.  At the sound of the door he looked up and closed the book gently — too gently. There was a little silence.

"You wanted to see me?" Jace said uncertainly.  His father's expression was carefully blank, but even across the room he could see the metallic glint in his eyes that meant he was very angry.  He shifted uneasily in the doorway, hesitating, one hand still on the knob.

"Close the door please, Jonathan."  His tone was glacial, as cold and inimical as the icicles glittering beyond the bright paned window.  The faint hope that he might have misread his expression shrivelled up in Jace's chest.  "And come here."

Swallowing, he shut the door quietly and set out across the vast Persian carpet towards the fireplace where his father was waiting, his footsteps muffled by the soft, deep pile.  His heart had begun thudding inside his chest: slow, loud hammer strokes that made him feel sick.

This was something bad.  Really bad.  Jace wasn't sure he could ever remember seeing his father so angry — not even the time he'd tried to lift down one of the broadswords from the weapons room wall, gashing his foot nearly to the bone.

Coming to a halt in front of his father, he looked up reluctantly.  The cold black gaze travelled over him slowly before returning to his face.

"I imagine, Jonathan, you know why you are here?"

But of course he hadn't the faintest idea.

Jace racked his brains urgently.  It was hard to imagine worse trouble than he was in already, but if anything could do it, he thought feverishly, it would be not owning up to the crime — whatever it was — he'd obviously committed.

But what could he possibly have done to anger his father like this?  And how could he have done something so awful without knowing it?  Jace gazed down at his scuffed boots as if the answer might be knotted into his bootlaces or lodged in a crack in the marble hearthstone, and cast wildly about in his memory. He came up empty handed.

Unless —

He felt himself colouring.  "This isn't about the _book_ , is it?" he blurted out.  The minute the words left his mouth he could see that he'd hit on it.

"But it was so boring," he protested before he could stop himself; and for a second, unaccountably, he thought he saw the hard lines of his father's body relax fractionally beneath the fine cloth of his shirt.  But a frightening gleam of anger shone in his dark eyes, and his mouth was a dangerous line.

"You were expressly forbidden to read the books on those shelves, Jonathan," his father said softly.  He set down the book he was holding carefully on the mantelpiece, his eyes never leaving Jace's face.  "You were not even to touch them."

A prickle ran down Jace's spine.

"Perhaps, son, you would care to explain how you came to disregard my exceedingly clear instructions.  Did you suppose I didn't mean it, when I told you to leave those books strictly alone?" 

His voice grew even softer.  "Or perhaps you forgot?"

He hadn't forgotten, of course. He knew better than to forget anything his father told him — especially prohibitions.  But he'd been curious to know what was so special about those slim leatherbound volumes with the unmarked spines.  And nobody did what they were told _all_ the time, did they?

He should have known he'd get caught — somehow his father always seemed to know when he did things he wasn't supposed to.

But he'd never dreamed, as he lugged the ladder from the far end of the library and scrambled up to the forbidden shelves beneath the bust of Socrates, that he was doing something really bad.  Bad enough to account for the bleakness he'd glimpsed behind the bright anger in his father's eyes — and bring down the terrible punishment which was obviously in store for him.  He looked up unhappily, a sick feeling of apprehension and guilt curdling the pit of his stomach.

His father was eyeing him appraisingly, the way you bent a bow to gauge its spring or balanced a blade between your palms, assessing its weight and reach.

"As a rule, your memory isn't as poor as that, Jonathan."  His voice was as dry as dust.  With an effort, Jace forced himself to meet the cool black gaze: if there was one thing his father disliked more than disobedience, it was shuffling.

"No, Father."

It wasn't a very good answer.  Jace tried to think of something else to say, but his thoughts seemed to have shrivelled up like a leaf in autumn.

His father's voice became drier still.  "Perhaps we'd better make sure it doesn't slip your mind again."  He was behind the broad mahogany desk now — its polished surface was covered with papers, the lamp and globe pushed to one side: he must have been at work, Jace thought blankly, when he called for him — reaching down to open one of the drawers.

When he straightened, Jace saw he had something dark coiled in his left hand.  It looked a lot like a belt.

A ripple of cold went through Jace. He watched his father walk around the desk and seat himself on the edge, his expression hard as glass.  He could feel the cold anger flowing off him like air from an ice field.

"And make certain we are quite clear, Jonathan. If you disobey me, there will be consequences."

Unquestionably, it was a belt.  Jace lifted his chin unconsciously.  His heart had begun bumping beneath his ribs so hard he could hear each separate heartbeat, loud and distinct in his ears.  His father was waiting, hand held out wordlessly in summons.  Numbly, he obeyed.

Powerful fingers closed hard on his arm and the room tipped abruptly as he was plucked off his feet by the waistband and upended unceremoniously over his father's knee.

Jace stared down at the carpet, its familiar, elaborate geometries of dusky purple and gold.  He'd stared at it often enough from this particular vantage point.  But his father had never hit him with a belt before.  He wondered, a little bewildered, what could be so terrible about a book.  It wasn't like it had been a spellbook, or even a book of Runes.  That kind of book was different, magical. It had power.  It could do things to you.  But all you got out of ordinary books was knowledge.  It was hard to see how knowing things could hurt anyone.

He felt his father's weight shift, and squeezed his eyes shut tight.   _You'll just have to be braver,_ he told himself doggedly.  He was not going to cry: Waylands didn't cry, and he was almost six and three quarters.  Outside the window he could hear a thrush carolling, buoyant reminder that winter was almost over and in a few weeks there would be lambs, and archery out in the water meadows and interesting expeditions with his father into the high hills.  A blackbird answered somewhere; and much closer at hand, a sharp whickering threaded the air.

Then the first careful blow fell, and thought became impossible.

 

*


	2. Valentine

 

You did what had to be done and didn't think about it.

His jaw tightened, fingers closing harder around the leather wrapped in his fist.  Sunlight flooding the tall, paned windows flung a net of sharp black lines over desk and carpet and his own swinging shadow like a retiarius, and glinted off the ring on his left hand as it steadily rose and fell and rose again.

The problem was the same, whether it was horses or hawks or children or, he imagined, dogs, though he'd never kept one — Angel alone knew what Jocelyn saw in the imbecile creatures: boisterous, untidy and fundamentally stupid.  Ravens were as faithful, and infinitely more intelligent and fastidious — clever enough to grasp what you wanted and wise enough to obey.  Discipline was never even a question there.

But with the rest, always the same delicate calculation: the fine line between curbing the rampant, egregious, unbridled will and breaking the spirit.  The child hadn't meant any harm — and thank the Angel, it would seem no real harm had been done — but good intentions were not enough; and the consequences of this piece of mischief, he thought with a fresh surge of anger, could easily have been appalling.  He was aware that he allowed Jonathan to get away with far too much with his scapegrace charm: far more than his own father had ever tolerated.  Discipline was the anvil on which the formidable self-discipline of a Shadowhunter was forged.  This lesson was long overdue.

And it had been deliberate disobedience.  His mouth hardened, the muscles cording in his arm.   _Another time, my son, you will think twice before disregarding my commands._

Small sounds from the kitchens drifted in like leaves on the wind.  He could tell that Jonathan was close to the limits of what he could bear, this small son whom he knew better than anyone living.  The slight body on his knee was rigid, his fist crammed hard against his mouth.  But it would take more than pain to break his son's indomitable spirit.  And he meant him to remember this.

Jonathan cried out then, a choked, muffled sound.  He counted two — three — four stifled cries before putting the belt aside and setting his son carefully on his feet.

The eyes that looked back at him out of Jonathan's white face were dark with shock and pain, his breath coming in queer hiccupping gasps.  He put a steadying hand under his elbow — the child looked for a second as if he were going to faint — but Jonathan flinched, and after a moment he dropped his hand and stood back.

"You may give me your apology, Jonathan, and then you may go."

The child nodded, struggling for the moment to get his breathing under control.  His gold eyes were still much too dark, but he looked steadier on his feet and his face had lost some of its alarming grey tinge.

"I'm sorry I disobeyed you, Father," he managed at length between one gulping breath and the next.  "And I promise I won't touch those shelves again." In the light from the window, you could see the tears still shining on his young cheeks, but his chin was firm and his back very straight.

His son's fortitude, he reflected, was everything he could possibly wish.  It was regrettable that he'd been obliged to break it.

Unexpectedly, an image of Jocelyn rose up in his mind.  He pushed it aside sharply, and looked down at his small, stalwart son.  Jonathan was still looking at him, his heart in his eyes.

"Take yourself upstairs then," he said, in a milder voice.  "I'll have something sent up at supper time." He paused and gazed thoughtfully at his son's subdued face.  It would be brimming soon enough, he trusted, with its usual irrepressible high spirits.

"I think perhaps it's time you had something else to read, to keep you out of mischief.  We might start you on Latin tomorrow."

Laying his hand on his son's shoulder, he steered him gently towards the door.

At the threshold, Jonathan checked and swung round to face him, hands gripped tightly behind his back.

"I really am sorry." The words tumbled out with a sort of desperate sincerity.  "I honestly didn't think it mattered so much." Contrition was printed plainly across his face.

"I know," he said gently, and saw a little of the strain leave the boy's white face.  "But now you know, Jonathan.  I mean what I say." He looked at his son steadily.  "I know you won't disobey me like that again."

And taking his hand from his son's arm, he closed the door softly behind him and turned back to the empty room.  A tedious afternoon of paperwork lay ahead of him.  Grimacing, he pulled out his chair with a booted toe and sat gazing a little blankly at the orderly piles he'd been preparing to tackle this morning when a chance errand in the library had brought Jonathan's disobedience to light.  Accounts first, and then correspondence.  There were one or two tricky enquiries he'd need to take some care over.

But as he sifted through the stacked papers on his desk, he found his thoughts straying to Jocelyn.  The way her face had flashed into his mind as he gazed down at —

He had been going to say: at _their_ valiant young son.  He found it difficult not to think of this child as Jocelyn's as well.  For his own part, he'd long since stopped making any distinction between his two sons.  Unsurprising perhaps, then, that she seemed as much part of this child's life — and as little — as of the other son he was raising without her.  She was, he supposed, the mother neither boy ever had.  And if he asked himself occasionally what Jocelyn would have done in raising their son — well, he found himself asking the same question about this child.

But not today, perhaps.  It was one of the rare times, he reflected, that he wasn't sorry Jocelyn was not here with him.  What had happened this afternoon was exactly the sort of thing he'd never been able to get her to understand properly.  He supposed it was one of the traits that, in spite of himself, he loved her for.  For all her steel, there were things she simply couldn't bring herself to do, means she couldn't embrace, however fiercely she willed the ends.  Her gift of sympathy shone so brightly it overwhelmed the clear, cold light of sense the way the soft light of dawn washed away the vast, brilliant pattern of the night sky.

As well for him she couldn't embrace them, he reflected wryly, or she'd probably have killed him with her own hands, long before the Uprising.

But squeamishness was a luxury he couldn't afford.  No one could, if it weren't for people made the way he was, to keep them safe and do the unpleasant things that had to be done.  He had no regrets about this afternoon's work.  The whole edifice of Jonathan's life was built over a chasm he could not be allowed to tumble into.  He was a lively, adventurous, inquisitive child, and there was nothing to fence him in from catastrophe but rules and obedience to them.  If your son ran into the road you smacked him, and the next time he would remember and stay out of harm's way.  If he strayed into worse — well, you did whatever you had to.

But he could still hear Jocelyn's horrified protest.   _Valentine.  You whipped your son, your exceptionally stoical son, until he screamed.  _Her voice was as clear as if she were standing by the desk, her green eyes appalled.

It had been necessary.  With an impatient frown he took up his pen and turned back to his papers.

_But Valentine...until he screamed? He's six years old — barely out of infancy._

In his head, his voice was weary.   _Jocelyn, it had to be a lesson he will never forget._

Impossible trying to explain it to her.  Even had she known about the ugly things that lay in the cellars Jonathan had come so frighteningly close to stumbling upon.

Which of course she didn't — for precisely the reason that she wouldn't understand what he had done to Jonathan.  Deeply as he loved her, there were things he could never share with her, not until she recognized — and by the Angel, someday he _would_ bring her to see it — the unpalatable truth.  Compunction was the first casualty of the war they were fighting.  Shadowhunters couldn't confine themselves scrupulously to sticking blades into demon flesh, not these days.  The threat facing humanity was too grave to be fastidious about the blood you shed along with the ichor.

_I don't do these things because I want to, Jocelyn.  I do them because I must._ At times he despaired of making anyone understand.  Even the Nephilim, bred to strength and sacrifice, were as weak as mundanes when it came to the singleness of purpose that was needed to hold back the black tide of evil remorselessly breaking over the world.  Weak and undisciplined, and willfully, cravenly, _criminally_ blind.  His was a solitary voice in the wilderness, as his father's had been.

So be it.  He would pursue his thankless path and serve his God, and pay the price in persecution, hatred and contempt that was always exacted from those who stood up against the corruption and complacency of entrenched power.  If he had once imagined otherwise, with the naive idealism of youth, he understood that now.

But the eye of Heaven saw everything he did.  And Heaven understood.

Demons knew no code, felt neither love nor pity, were bent on nothing but pain and destruction.  If the survival of those you loved — of every living thing in the world — rested upon you, it was not enough to be brave and valiant and lay your life down heroically defending them to the last redoubt and ditch.  You had to fight to win.

No matter how badly it hurt you or them, or anyone else.

Jonathan would be all right.  He was young and resilient; he would be all the stronger for the experience.  The time would come when he was old enough to learn the secrets which lay beneath his childhood, and assume the burden of his true patrimony.  One day, his valiant young son would fight by his side in his unforgiving and solitary struggle.  But this fledgling eaglet of his must have time to grow into his gifts, to find his feet and learn his warrior's craft.

Pushing back his chair, he rose and stood for a moment gazing across the bright, cold lawn to the tangle of bare trees that circled the new-sprung grass in a cradling thicket.  Sheltered in this obscure retreat, his small nestling could grow and thrive in safety until his wings were feathered to soar.  And he would teach him strength, and steel him for the battle to which Heaven had called him.

_I'll look after him,_ he vowed to the shade of his absent wife.  I can't promise not to hurt him.  You know that as well as I do.  But I will make sure he comes whole and strong and flourishing to manhood, I swear it.  I would protect him with my life.  And I will make him the finest Shadowhunter the world has ever seen.

The voice in his head was silent.

But patience was one of his virtues.  He could wait.  Someday he would find her.  And she would meet this child and begin to understand a little better the good he meant to do this world.

|o|


	3. Epilogue

 

Epilogue

_This may just be my imagination, but..._

...I'm pretty certain Jace wakes in the night. Moonlight is pouring across his bed from a high, cold moon, and he supposes this must be what woke him, or else the pain, which has dulled to something manageable but certainly not yet gone. And then he hears it — a cascade of musical notes, rapid, lucid, precise: Bach, or maybe Scarlatti, carrying softly on the clear night air. It's been a long time, he thinks, since he's heard his father play the piano. He settles back into bed — it's too cold to stay kneeling on top of the bedclothes for long — but he lies awake for a long time, head buried on his folded arms, listening to the controlled, meticulous playing, and the queer undercurrent of some emotion he can't identify moving beneath the flawless phrases.

 

_Sheffield , Mass  
February 2013_

* * *

I hope you've enjoyed this series so far.  More stories to come!  (And if you haven't yet read [the others](http://archiveofourown.org/series/356864), I encourage you to: in my head, they're all really chapters out of a single story, the story of Jace's magical and appalling childhood with Valentine). 

I've also added an outtake — one final glimpse of Jace on this awful day — as an extra chapter to this fic.

For a different sort of story about Valentine, you might try [_Odi et Amo_](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5350409/chapters/12355196), my work-in-progress about Valentine and Jocelyn in the days and hours before the start of _City of Bones_. _—MM_


	4. A Peek Round Jace's Door (Outtake)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A small scrap from the cutting-room floor. Like all my postscripts, it's pure guesswork, a stab at imagining what is happening after the lights have gone up and the storyteller has gone home. But there is a fighting chance that it is true.  
>   
> 

* * *

_So this is REALLY an outtake, and has no place in this story.  But I couldn't resist peeking round the door of Jace's room that long afternoon, as his father sits in his study working through the papers on his desk and thinking of Jocelyn..._

* * *

 

|o|

One finds him, I think, lying on his stomach on the floor of his room, playing with snail shells and a marble.  Over the years he's collected bucketfuls of shells in all sizes and colours, which he keeps in a wooden box under his bed to use as demons for his toy Shadowhunters.  This afternoon, he's laid them out in clusters and is morosely mowing them down with a cloudy grey glass marble he's pretending is a cannonball.

It's so unfair, he can't help thinking, that you can't put runes on anything that goes bang in real life.  Cannons are such a better way of wiping out enemies than dispatching them laboriously one by one with a blade or an arrow — and so much more fun.  But guns won't work on demons, his father says; you can't even use them on Downworlders unless you make the balls and bullets out of silver or cold iron — or he supposes, holy water: he's pretty sure water cannon are mentioned in some mundane book of his father's.

He rolls the marble again and watches a row of pinkish-white Raum demons scatter.  He's trying not to think about any of it: his shock and bewilderment, the weight of guilt and misery lying like a stone at the bottom of his stomach, the pain, which is still pretty severe.  But his father's face keeps rising up in his mind, the cold anger in his eyes.  He wishes he'd never touched the beastly book.  He wishes he had managed to keep his vow, and not cried.  He doesn't think he acquitted himself very well.  He wonders if his father will still be furious in the morning.

At least he won't have to face him till then; it's the only good thing he can think of in any of this.  And surely he wasn't imagining it when he thought he saw his father's expression relent a little — at the very end, when he said he was sorry?

Latin tomorrow, his father said.  He wonders what Latin is like, whether it will be anything like learning French.  But then, he's known French forever, bits and pieces anyway.  He can't remember a time when his father didn't tell him his bedtime story in French, and before that there was his nursemaid, Sylvie.

His recollection of her is hazy: her long grey dress and white apron, the thick dark hair neatly coiled on top of her head.  She smelt of violets and soap, he remembers, and her hands fluttered about her like birds as she spoke.  As far back into infancy as memory will reach, she seems to be there, a vague, fussing presence: to get him up and dress him and give him his egg in the bright, low-ceilinged nursery at the top of the house; to take him out in the gardens to play, or keep him out of mischief indoors if the weather was too horrible even for a Wayland; to bring him to his father in the afternoons — or was it mornings sometimes too?  a hazy memory floats up of lying on that Persian carpet in a pool of morning sun, stacking wooden blocks marked with runes while his father works — to see to his supper in the evening, and give him his bath and put him to bed.  And talking at him, always tiresomely talking the way nursemaids do — in French.

Until of course she wasn't there anymore.  After the time he managed to slip away from her, and fell off the wall of the kitchen garden and broke his collarbone, and Sylvie was sent away.  After that his bed was brought down from the nursery, and he got to eat his meals with his father at the long, polished table in the dining room, and learn about demons and fighting and all the fascinating, deadly weapons in the armoury upstairs, and it was just the two of them together, always, for everything...

_Anyway, people don't speak Latin,_ he tells himself impatiently, _So it's obviously going to be different, stupid._

He retrieves the marble and shies it savagely into a clump of lumpy black Raveners.  The sun has barely moved across the sky; the narrow, barred shadows cast by his iron bedstead lie stubbornly at the same unchanging angle across the wide floorboards.  Was there ever an afternoon as long as this one?  Wincing, he shifts himself onto hands and knees and clambers over painfully to extract the marble from under a chair.  Settling back on his stomach, he takes aim again.  A phalanx of poisonous-looking lemon-yellow shells explodes spectacularly, and the marble comes to rest in the far corner of the room.  Suddenly it seems too much effort to haul himself up and get it, and he lays his head down on his arms, the backs of his eyes stinging with the tears he refuses to let come.  And to his surprise, because it's years since he stopped taking his afternoon nap, he falls deeply and mercifully asleep.

Cantab  
June 2013

* * *

_Poor little valiant Jace: my heart bleeds for him.  But it is the chronicler's job to tell the story as it happened..._

* * *

 

If you liked this story, you might enjoy my other  _[Songs of Innocence](http://archiveofourown.org/series/356864)_ stories — they're all really leaves out of a single book. You might also try my Valentine and Jocelyn fic _[Odi et Amo](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5350409/chapters/12355196)_ or my school-era fic _[The Circle Game](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6159835/chapters/14113798).  _ More stories about Jocelyn and Valentine to come soon.... 

 


End file.
